Arp: Paper

Discover renowned avant-gardist Hans/Jean Arp’s works with and on paper in this expansive survey of the artist’s drawings and collages.

From his early years as part of Zurich Dada until the 1960s, Hans/Jean Arp produced an extraordinary and influential body of work. He is best known for two- and three-dimensional work deploying biomorphic forms that would come to epitomize organic abstraction. This new publication focuses on Arp’s works on paper, as well as his paper collages, providing a comprehensive picture of their role in the artist’s multifaceted output, including as a vehicle for play and as a way of inventing new worlds. Split across five chapters, some 200 illustrations offer a rich and representative selection of works that have mostly never been reproduced or exhibited publicly before. An intriguing new perspective on the artist’s unique vocabulary of shapes and gestures emerges through the book’s thematic, non-chronological groupings, while illuminating texts by Arie Hartog and Loretta Würtenberger unpack the formal language and artistic resonances of these works, both drawing out their connections to Arp’s iconic sculptural practice and considering his prolific work with and on paper as a fascinating world in itself.